[caption id="attachment_1231" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The official logo for the Resource Identification Initiative.[/caption]

The ContentMine team has identified a significant new target to mine the literature for: Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs). Why? To help researchers identify who else has used certain research resources in previously published research - this is particularly important to assess the efficacy and performance of potential lab purchases such as antibodies. Knowing that a particular resource has been successfully used by others recently can give confidence in that resource.

What are Research Resource Identifiers?

Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) are persistent and unique identifiers for referencing a research resource. So far, the research resources include: antibodies, model organisms, software and databases. It is unrelated to the ‘Renal Risk in Derby’ project, which unfortunately is also commonly-abbreviated to RRID.

What do RRIDs look like in the literature?

Here’s one example of how they are used to uniquely identify a resource:

“This expression pattern was confirmed using RNA expression data from the Cerebellar Development Transcriptome Database (RRID:nif-0000–00008)”

Ideally RRIDs are indicated in text, in a CURIE style, whereby each identifier is prefixed with "RRID:" followed by a second acronym that indicates the authority for the identifier. In the above example, ‘nif’ indicates that the Neuroscience Information Framework is the authority for the RRID. You can now find RRIDs mentioned in some journal articles e.g. at PLOS ONE (~23 articles) and BMC journals (~25 articles) . Over 500 articles so far include RRIDs and we hope this practice to will become mainstream in neuroscience and perhaps beyond.

Who’s in charge and where can I learn more?

The Resource Identification Initiative (RII) in-charge of RRIDs is led by Anita Bandrowski and Melissa Haendel, with the help of the FORCE11 grassroots organization, amongst others. You can read more about the initiative in this open access paper: